began in 2000 with the letter M, and, as of September 2007, reached the word purposive, each successive change made available for the dictionary’s online subscribers. And the new Shorter Oxford provides a telling example of those changes, reflecting, and partly anticipating, the transformations unfolding in the unabridged third edition of the O.E.D. Much has changed since then, when Walter Scott - now a literary wraith - was the dictionary’s second most-quoted English writer after Shakespeare. That dictionary, like this, its latest spinoff (“a byproduct or an incidental development from a larger project”), was created “on historical principles.” This means that it not only defined the words but also cited their earliest known uses, drawn from what the first volume of that first edition, published in 1888, called “all the great English writers of all ages.” The mother lode (“a principal or rich source”) is, of course, the great 1928 first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which defined 414,000 words in 15,490 pages. Of that, this two-volume dictionary may be partly guilty, since it is partly plundered.
They are “compiled,” a word that, according to the newly published Sixth Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the Latin, compilare, meaning to plunder or plagiarize. Nor, for that matter, are dictionaries “written” anymore. A lexicographer, if any good, is hardly a drudge, and if bad, is hardly harmless.
In his 1755 dictionary Samuel Johnson defined the lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Unfortunately Johnson was uncharacteristically wrong.
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